Nature has appeared dressed in her veil of snowy flowers for the bridal. We have seen her brooding over her joys, a young mother in the pride and fulness of beauty, and then bearing her offspring to their richly ornamented sepulchre, and lately observed her as if kneeling with folded hands in the stillness of prayer, while the bare trees and frozen streams bore witness to her patience. O, much, much have we seen, and a little learned. Such is the record of the private mind; and yet, as the bright snake-skin is cast, many sigh and cry,-- "The wiser mind Mourns less for what Time takes away Than what he leaves behind." But for ourselves, we find there is kernel in the nut, though its ripening be deferred till the late frosty weather, and it prove a hard nut to crack even then. Looking at the individual, we see a degree of growth, or the promise of such. In the child there is a force which will outlast the wreck, and reach at last the promised shore. The good man, once roused from his moral lethargy, shall make atonement for his fault, and endure a penance that will deepen and purify his whole nature. The poor lost ones claim a new trial in a new life, and will there, we trust, seize firmer hold on the good for the experience they have had of the bad. "We never see the stars Till we can see nought else." The seeming losses are, in truth, but as pruning of the vine to make the grapes swell more richly. But how is it with those larger individuals, the nations, and that congress of such, the world? We must take a broad and superficial view of these, as we have of private life; and in neither case can more be done. The secrets of the confessional, or rather of the shrine, do not come on paper, unless in poetic form. So we will not try to search and mine, but only to look over the world from an ideal point of view. Here we find the same phenomena repeated; the good nation is yet somehow so sick at heart that you are not sure its goodness will ever produce a harmony of life; over the young nation, (our own,) rich in energy and full of glee, brood terrible omens; others, as Poland and Italy, seem irrecoverably lost. They may revive, but we feel as if it must be under new forms. Forms come and go, but principles are developed and displayed more and more. The caldron simmers, and so great is the fire that we expect it soon to boil over, and new fates appear for Europe.